Winter Break Manual Dexterity Activities

With the pandemic impacting clinic and pre-clinical hours, you may feel that your hands haven’t gotten the manual dexterity strength you were hoping to obtain during the Fall 2020 semester. Throw winter break in the mix, and now you have to wait until the Spring semester to get a hold of a handpiece. I came up with different ways that you can still keep up with your manual dexterity without physically being in dental school. Here’s my list:

1. If you can, bring home your waxing kit. Create a fun environment and wax on and wax off.

2. Painting or knitting, and giving the final product as a gift.

3. Bring out the coloring book! It will help you to stay in the lines, which I felt help with my preps to make sure I stayed within the dimensions and limits. Try coloring with both hands and use different sized coloring utensils.

4. Bake! This is great because you can still keep up with your spatulating and mixing alginate skills while at the same time giving into your sweet tooth!

5. Eat with chopsticks!

6. Learn to or pick up an instrument! I need to dust off my clarinet and buy some reeds as we speak.

7. Drive a car or ride a bike! This will help with hand eye coordination and keep that foot pedal power strong!

8. When applying makeup, use a finger rest!

9. When writing with a writing utensil, use the modified pen grip!

10. Pouring with your non-dominant hand is one of my favorite past times I’ve been doing during winter break.

11. Playing video games to keep the manual dexterity and hand eye coordination alive. I’ve recently been reliving my childhood playing Mario Party with my siblings on the Switch.

12. Give yourself an at home manicure and pedicure. I will be wearing my loupes the next time I do this so my eyes won’t need to adjust too much when I go back in the spring.

For more manual dexterity ideas, you can visit: https://www.adea.org/GoDental/Application_Prep/Preparing_for_Dental_School/The_Importance_of_Manual_Dexterity.aspx

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This post was contributed by Sania Naqvi, Admin Affairs Chair at ADEA COSRF District 2 and student at University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine ('23). Instagram: @doctor_of_pearls